[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 16 23:51:20 UTC 2006

On 10/16/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 16/10/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
>
> > I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
> > any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
> > some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source
> software
> > companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in
> the
> > public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that
> we
> > could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for
> Wikipedia
> > itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
> > significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.
>
> I am afraid this really isn't much of a reply to your suggestion, but
> it leaped into my head when I read it...
>
> If we went down the road of "buying copyrights", we'd probably end up
> setting up a "licensing trust", a registered charitable organisation
> whose sole purpose is to acquire intellectual property and license it
> out For The Betterment Of Humanity.
>
> Of course, the benefit of a registered charity is that donations to it
> are tax-deductible - and, much to my delight, it seems that this even
> extends to gifts of intellectual property. So, put two and two
> together, and how about having them tout for donations?
>
> "We reckon the rights to that 1953 memoir your grandfather wrote are
> worth maybe $250. However, that's if it gets republished, and there
> isn't much commercial demand for books on 1940s Minnesota state
> politics. But if you want to get *something* for it, you could donate
> the copyright to us and put it down as a tax-deductible donation of
> $250..."
>
> Unfortunately, the legal burden of confirming that the person you're
> dealing with is, in fact, the copyright owner may be insurmountable -
> most "unwanted IP" will be inheritances, and figuring out who got them
> in the will is not always easy. But it's worth a shot.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
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>

This may not be all that hard, in many cases.

My late Grandfather wrote a reasonably widely used introductory general
science college textbook in the 1950s, with several editions through the
late 50s.  There's probably no likelyhood that it could be republished now,
and even if it could be I think all involved would react positively to
CC-something licensing it, perhaps just outright donating it.

There had been some talk about this after my grandmother passed away a few
years ago, but nobody acted on it.

In a lot of families, there are younger scientists of some sort in a newer
generation, and many of those could likely be a positive force arguing
within families to donate the copyrights, or at least open-licensing the
material, for the common good.

I think that it's likely that people will be more willing to open license
than outright donate rights completely; in a sense, it's a family heirloom,
in many cases.  But unlike most family heirlooms, book rights can be useful
to the general public still, without the family losing it.

I bet that there would be a huge net benefit to starting up and organising a
donations campaign for such a trust.  A website, some volunteers, a
consistent donations policy, and a little legwork to get some PR out in the
scientific press would go a long way.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com